Adrian Pepe is a fibre artist whose practice is rooted in textiles and shaped by direct engagement with sentient providers of raw material—whether plant or animal. Working across soft sculpture, hybridised skins, and immersive installations, he draws on ancestral techniques while responding to contemporary ecological and social urgencies. His work centres on fibrous materials that exist at the margins of value: overlooked, surplus, or treated as waste. He approaches these materials as both archives and agents, carrying ecological memory and traces of labour.
Attending closely to these traces informs his methodology. For Pepe, making becomes a language of resistance and reflection—a way of thinking through material rather than acting upon it. His practice operates as a form of knowledge production: an ethical mode of inquiry and a relational gesture that connects the body to its surroundings through touch.
Born in La Ceiba, Honduras, and currently based across Western Asia, Pepe’s practice has been shaped less by a single geography than by prolonged experiences of movement, displacement, and cultural exchange. Developed through years of working across diverse ecological, material, and cultural contexts, his perspective is trans-situated, informed by processes of translation, adaptation, and negotiation between systems.
His approach is performative, process-based, and research-driven. Repetition functions as a method of remaining in dialogue with material, while the works themselves emerge through slow, deliberate labour and the accumulation of effort, decay, and care. Through these gestures, bodies enter into relation with landscape, forming a morphology of care enacted through craft, making, and embellishment.
